Online research in philosophy

Josiah Royce; [poem] by L. Simmons)--The duties of Americans in the present war.--The destruction of the Lusitania.--The hope of the great community.--The possibility of international insurance.--The first anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, May 7th, 1916.--Words of Professor Royce at the Walton Hotel at Philadelphia, December 29, 1915.

A layman's view of history.--Old age.--The education of Henry Adams.--Mont-Saint Michel and Chartres.--The Phi beta kappa ideal.--Pieces written during the war: The pathos of America. Sub specie æternitatis. The wisdom of the ages.

Cities, at their best, are cradles of diversity, opportunity, and citizenship. Why, then, do so many cities today seem scarred by divisions separating the powerful and privileged from the victims of deprivation and injustice? What is it like to live on the wrong side of the divide in Paris, London, New York, Sao Paolo, and other cities all over the world? -/- In this book, based on the internationally renowned Oxford Amnesty Lectures, eight leading urban thinkers argue about (...) why divisions arise in cities and about what could and should be done to bring those divisions to an end. The book features essays by Patrick Declerck, Stuart Hall, David Harvey, Richard Rogers, Patricia Williams, and James Wolfensohn, with commentaries from Peter Hall, Michael Likosky, and others. The many contemporary issues that the book addresses include the impact of globalization and migration on the urban environment, the consequences of the 'war on terror' for those living in cities, the new development paradigm being adopted by international institutions in the developing world, the need for a genuine urban renaissance in Britain and elsewhere, and the suffering of the homeless. -/- These controversial and sometimes conflicting essays, linked by Richard Scholar's incisive introduction, aim to encourage and inform debate about the challenges to human rights in our increasingly urban world. (shrink)

How far can we apply the same moral principles to both public and private behaviour. In the interests of effective political action, are we right to accept acts of deceit, exploitation or force which we would regard as unacceptable in private relations with individuals? What means can be properly adopted in the promotion of great public causes? The problem of 'dirty hands' in politics was posed most strikingly by Machiavelli. It has re-emerged this century in a pressing and, to some (...) extent, a new form, in connection with the two World Wars and more recently the Vietnam War, where the political decisions and the destruction, and risks of destruction, have been of a scale and character not previously experienced. The contributors, including Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, T. M. Scanlon, and Ronald Dworkin, examine the background to this problem in moral and political theory. (shrink)

Religion and intelligence.--The philosophic theory of knowledge.--The absolute object of intelligence.--The Biblical theory of knowledge.--Biblical ontology: the absolute.--Biblical ontology: the world.--Biblical ontology: man.--Comparative philosophic content of Christianity.

Retrieving our spiritual heritage: a challenge of our time -- Spiritual foundation of human rights -- Response to the president of Ireland -- World peace and interreligious understanding -- Education as transformation: a Baha'i model of education for unity -- Globalization and the Baha'i community in the Muslim world -- Unity of vision and ethic: values and the workplace -- Environmental ethics: a Baha'i perspective -- 'Abdu'l-Baha and the spiritual foundation of the American dream -- United Nations and (...) world order -- Ethics of globalization: a Baha'i perspective -- Opening of the academic mind: the challenges facing a culture in crisis -- Heritage: poetry and archeology as the common language of the past, the present, and the future -- Address given before the House of Lords. (shrink)

Heidegger's assessment of animals in his 1929/30 Freiburg lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, has been the focal point of much recent debate. In this course, it appears Heidegger preserves the prejudices of metaphysical humanism by establishing an opposition between animal "behavior" (Benehmen) and human "comportment" (Verhalten) to the extent that humans, unlike animals, embody an understanding of being and, therefore, encounter beings as such. In this essay, I suggest this distinction can be properly understood only by turning to (...) Heidegger's earliest Freiburg lectures where the question of "factical life" (das faktische Leben) is explicitly addressed. In these lectures, I argue Heidegger develops a three-tiered distinction that allows us to differentiate human life from animal life: (1) Humans, unlike animals, can articulate how things in the world matter to them in terms of where they fit in a meaningful nexus of social relations. (2) By becoming absorbed in these everyday social relations, human life has a unique tendency to secure itself from the abyssal structure of its own temporal "movement" (Bewegung). (3) Human life has the capacity to announce its abyssal structure, an announcement that affects us as anxiety, and makes it possible for us to own up to our temporal and historical constitution. Finally, I suggest that, for Heidegger, any interpretation of animality--whether anthropocentric or not--is itself made possible by a horizonal "event" that is more-than-human, that is always prior to and makes possible any understanding of being whatsoever. (shrink)

Philosophers have postulated the existence of God to explain (I) why any contingent objects exist at all rather than nothing contingent, and (II) why the fundamental laws of nature and basic facts of the world are exactly what they are. Therefore, we ask: (a) Does (I) pose a well-conceived question which calls for an answer? and (b) Can God's presumed will (or intention) provide a cogent explanation of the basic laws and facts of the world, as claimed by (...) (II)? We shall address both (a) and (b). To the extent that they yield an unfavourable verdict, the afore-stated reasons for postulating the existence of God are undermined. As for question (I), in 1714, G. W. Leibniz posed the Primordial Existential Question (hereafter ‘PEQ’): ‘Why is there something contingent at all, rather than just nothing contingent?’ This question has two major presuppositions: (1) A state of affairs in which nothing contingent exists is indeed genuinely possible (‘the Null Possibility’), the notion of nothingness being both intelligible and free from contradiction; and (2) De jure, there should be nothing contingent at all, and indeed there would be nothing contingent in the absence of an overriding external cause (or reason), because that state of affairs is ‘most natural’ or ‘normal’. The putative world containing nothing contingent is the so-called ‘Null World’. As for (1), the logical robustness of the Null Possibility of there being nothing contingent needs to be demonstrated. But even if the Null Possibility is demonstrably genuine, there is an issue: Does that possibility require us to explain why it is not actualized by the Null World, which contains nothing contingent? And, as for (2), it originated as a corollary of the distinctly Christian precept (going back to the second century) that the very existence of any and every contingent entity is utterly dependent on God at any and all times. Like (1), (2) calls for scrutiny. Clearly, if either of these presuppositions of Leibniz's PEQ is ill founded or demonstrably false, then PEQ is aborted as a non-starter, because in that case, it is posing an ill-conceived question. In earlier writings (Grünbaum [2000], p. 5), I have introduced the designation ‘SoN’ for the ontological ‘spontaneity of nothingness’ asserted in presupposition (2) of PEQ. Clearly, in response to PEQ, (2) can be challenged by asking the counter-question, ‘But why should there be nothing contingent, rather than something contingent?’ Leibniz offered an a priori argument for SoN. Yet it will emerge that a priori defences of it fail, and that it has no empirical legitimacy either. Indeed physical cosmology spells an important relevant moral: As against any a priori dictum on what is the ‘natural’ status of the universe, the verdict on that status depends crucially on empirical evidence. Thus PEQ turns out to be a non-starter, because its presupposed SoN is ill founded! Hence PEQ cannot serve as a springboard for creationist theism. Yet Leibniz and the English theist Richard Swinburne offered divine creation ex nihilo as their answer to the ill-conceived PEQ. But being predicated on SoN, their cosmological arguments for the existence of God are fundamentally unsuccessful. The axiomatically topmost laws of nature (the ‘nomology’) in a scientific theory are themselves unexplained explainors, and are thus thought to be true as a matter of brute fact. But theists have offered a theological explanation of the specifics of these laws as having been willed or intended by God in the mode of agent causation to be exactly what they are. A whole array of considerations are offered in Section 2 to show that the proposed theistic explanation of the nomology fails multiply to transform scientific brute facts into specifically explained regularities. Thus, I argue for The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology in two major respects. Why is there something rather than nothing? 1.1 Refined statement of Leibniz's Primordial Existential Question (PEQ) 1.2 Is it imperative to explain why there isn't just nothing contingent? 1.3 Must we explain why any and every de facto unrealized logical possibility is not actualized? 1.4 Is a world not containing anything contingent logically possible? 1.5 Christian doctrine as an inspiration of PEQ 1.6 Henri Bergson 1.7 A priori justifications of PEQ by Leibniz, Parfit, Swinburne and Nozick 1.7.1 Leibniz 1.7.2 Derek Parfit 1.7.3 Richard Swinburne and Thomas Aquinas vis-à-vis SoN 1.7.4 The ‘natural’ status of the world as an empirical question 1.7.5 Robert Nozick 1.8 Hypothesized psychological sources of PEQ 1.9 PEQ as a failed springboard for creationist theism: the collapse of Leibniz's and Swinburne's theistic cosmological arguments Do the most fundamental laws of nature require a theistic explanation? 2.1 The ontological inseparability of the laws of nature from the furniture of the universe 2.2 The probative burden of the theological explanation of the world's nomology 2.3 The theistic explanation of the cosmic nomology 2.4 Further major defects of the theological explanation of the fundamental laws of nature Conclusion * Editorial note: Fifty-one years ago, Professor Grünbaum published his first paper in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, in the issue for 1953. It was entitled ‘Whitehead's Method of Extensive Abstraction’ (British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 4, pp. 215–26). The Editor wishes to acknowledge Grünbaum's extraordinary achievement in philosophy of science and in particular the debt that this journal owes to so distinguished and productive an author. This essay originated in the first two of my three Leibniz Lectures, delivered at the University of Hanover, Germany, 25–27 June 2003. (shrink)